Salt Lake City

Plan‑B Brings Shakespearean Gender Fluidity To The Stage

by Jose Davila IV | Feb 27, 2024 11:12 am

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Posted to: Theater

Balthazar
Plan‑B Theatre at the Studio Theatre in the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center
Salt Lake City
Feb. 22, 2024

I couldn’t have gotten a better first taste of Utah theater than a performance of Plan‑B Theatre’s new play Balthazar. Intimate, smart, and innovative, the production asked good questions and played with language in ways I hadn’t encountered before.

The show, running through next weekend, adapts William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice by placing a closeted Bellario, played by Jason Bowcutt, and a genderfluid Portia/Balthazar, played by Lily Hye Soo Dixon, at its center. It’s a small, two-person production set almost exclusively in Bellario’s stately law office in Padua. It’s a short show, but that doesn’t stop the characters from changing right before our eyes.

Debora Threedy’s script stands out as the show’s best quality. The clash of wits between rich-but-stubborn Portia and her upstanding uncle Bellario entertains throughout. Each takes opportunities to strike the other over their social and legal identities. Throughout the play Bellario chastises Portia for assuming the identity and dress of Balthazar, telling her it’s a dangerous, risky gambit and once even calling her ​“unnatural.” She immediately turns the tables on him by asking him, as a man with a male sexual partner, if he himself is unnatural. It’s the moment that Bellario understands Portia’s identity.

It’s a play based on arguments, both legal and personal, but Threedy also preserves the familial aspect of Bellario’s relationship to his niece. The two, despite their disagreements, never lose the sense of playfulness family so often share with one another. Hye Soo and Bowcutt model that effectively with excitable movement across the office and through big bodily gestures. 

Threedy’s script also uses a mix of modern and older language. The audience never forgets where the play is set and when, but can fully grasp the banter and the depth of passion of the two characters. On the delivery front, though, I did feel that Bowcutt and Hye Soo sometimes rushed through their debates, almost moving too fast for the audience to keep up with their elaborate legal brainstorming. And some of the movement around Bellario’s office felt forced, as if director Cheryl Ann Cluff just wanted her characters to do something other than talk for once. 

Other times, the staging was brilliant. When Balthazar first walks into Bellario’s office, the lawyer asks the young gentleman to remove his mask, which turns into a rousing game of cat-and-mouse in which Portia closely investigates the paintings on the wall and compliments the view out the window in a bid to hide her face from Bellario. When Portia is beseeching her uncle to accept Balthazar, he literally sits in her seat in the office, subtly showing that he’s trying to put himself in her shoes.

While I loved the intricate, deep conversations that could happen in a play with only two characters, I do wish more of the original roles from The Merchant of Venice were filled. Some of the show’s most dramatic scenes, like Balthazar’s courtroom win and his later ask for Bassanio’s wedding ring as payment (a test concocted by Portia to assess his love for her), play out off-stage. The audience is left to hear Portia’s retelling of the events. I would’ve loved to see Portia’s legal wit and Balthazar’s confidence in action in front of the judge. It could’ve made Balthazar feel even more central to Portia’s identity.

I thoroughly enjoyed the set design. The hanging drapes and the wall of fancy paintings perfectly capture the stately-but-traditional sensibilities of the man who had them in his office. The massive desk with law books piled on top did, too. It also hints at Bellario’s power that he demonstrates when he puts a blackmailer of his behind bars. The set doesn’t take up the whole space, which provided a great opportunity to open a scene at a fancy ball with a commotion that starts outside of the staged office area. It’s immediately clear to the audience that the characters are in a different place at that moment.

I’ve heard that Plan‑B ​“kicks ass.” This play certainly lived up to that billing by taking something old and broadening its revelatory power to the present-day with creative character development and evocative language. Catch it if you can.

What’s next for Plan‑B: The theatre continues its season with another riff on Shakespeare. In Bitter Lemon by Melissa Leilani Larson, Lady Macduff is stuck in a purgatorial waiting room with Findlay Macbeth. It runs April 11 – 23 in the same space.

What’s next for me: This is my first review from Salt Lake City, my new home after moving from Reno. Please reach out with arts events you think we should write reviews about. And please check out the other reviews on our site coming from places like Anchorage, Albany, and Arkansas.